Tuesday, 10 July 2018

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime - Moonlit Critbit [Gaming]

During my porting of content to the archive, I came
across a few posts that were like reviews, but I felt couldn't really be
classified as such. I decided to make a new classification in which to fit
them, but since I was planning on starting a new series for more informal
reviews anyway, this gives me a great time to start Moonlit Critbit.

This series is where I’ll be giving an informal look at
games, films, and TV that aren’t part of any other series [so A Look Inside the
Morphing Grid covering Power Rangers]. One of the previous posts I now tag as a
Moonlit Critbit is The Series of Ice Age – where I looked at the
characterisation in the first two and how it works in the story. I didn’t do
the same with the third and fourth films as I hadn’t got around to watching
them, and that post was very spur of the moment.

Anyway, that’s the past and this is the present. And the
present gives us Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. A spin-off to the Dragon
Quest series, the Japanese series of Slime MoriMori started life on the GBA in
2003. A third game in the series hit the 3DS in 2011, which brings us to the
second. Originally released in Japan in 2005, the second game is the only one
to have been localised – in North America only – a year later.

My experience with the game didn’t come until I would
think 2008, when DS flashcarts were all the rage. Now, don’t think I was one of
those people who grabbed anything and everything available. Aside from Harvest
Moon, this was the only other game I had on it. Which is funny really, as
having both of these games introduced me to their respective series, of which I
now own a fair few games from each.

As for the game itself, there was one element I
absolutely loved from it. The tank battles. See, the story itself was a fun one
– with a band of enemies from the Dragon Quest series being involved in an
organisation called the Plob who kidnap an entire village of various slimes –
more for the characters involved and the various interactions they had. It
never took itself seriously [even in the final chapter], and I loved it for
that, but the tank battles were the main reason I loved this game.

At the start, it would just be your slime against crews
of up to four in another tank – which were all shaped differently. Some would
be designed like the Plob member you faced while others would be based on
something related to that member. But the starting screen of these battles
would give the name of the tank and a tagline for that tank, all of which had a
certain charm about them. One such being The Pyramaniac – Doesn’t Fight
Pharaoh.

Then there were the battles themselves, in which each
tank had two cannons that ammo would be fired out of. You’d find the ammo from
one of three dispensing areas and launch it from those cannons. The ammo was
varied, having different damage values and some having other effects. Since
there’s a lower and higher path for the ammo to fly to the other tank, it gave
strategy in what you would use where. Shields were useful for blocking a few
items while also allowing you to keep the heavier hitting stuff behind it and
hoping for it to land.

Once a tank hit zero HP, it would then be time for a trip
into the other tank to attack the heart of it [which was a literal heart] and
win the battle. Once you unlocked the ability to have crew members yourself, it
opened up more options for battle, as crew members had two commands you could
switch between. You could either have them deal with the cannons and distract
the enemy, or get some of your crew to distract the enemy while you dealt with
the cannons. If you so desired, you could even fire your crew into those
cannons, with some having commands that were useful when you did so.

It was always fun to get to a tank battle and fight it
out, swapping ammo and crew members to see what worked best. Eventually you
could even start gaining the ability to use the various enemies you capture in
the adventure as crew members – all with their own unique set of commands. Once
all the members of the village have been rescued, a tank battle tournament
opens, where everything learnt about tank battles in the adventure gets used in
four ranks of the tournament ladder.

For the time, the game was something fun, and it still is
to this day. The main adventure might be easy, but it’s the tank battles that
are the main feature this time around I feel. Everything in the game is built
around them, and it’s just a shame that the third Slime MoriMori game never got
localised, as that one featured a world spanning adventure in ships – with all
the mechanics of the tank battles being present for the ship battles.